1 ON THE MORNING of its First Birthday, a baby was found floating in a cello case in the middle of the English Channel.

It was the only living thing for miles. Just the baby, and some dining room chairs, and the tip of a ship disappearing into the ocean. There had been music in the dining hall, and it was music so loud and so good that nobody had noticed the water flooding in over the carpet. The violins went on sawing for some time after the screaming had begun. Sometimes the shriek of a passenger would duet with a high C.

The baby was found wrapped for warmth in the musical score of a Beethoven symphony. It had drifted almost a mile from the ship, and was the last to be rescued. The man who lifted it into the rescue boat was a fellow passenger, and a scholar. It is a scholar’s job to notice things. He noticed that it was a girl, with hair the color of lightning, and the smile of a shy person.

Think of nighttime with a speaking voice. Or think how moonlight might talk, or think of ink, if ink had vocal cords. Give those things a narrow aristocratic face with hooked eyebrows, and long arms and legs, and that is what the baby saw as she was lifted out of her cello case and up into safety. His name was Charles Maxim, and he determined, as he held her in his large hands—at arm’s length, as he would a leaky flowerpot—that he would keep her.

The baby was almost certainly one year old. They knew this because of the red rosette pinned to her front, which read, 1!

“Or rather,” said Charles Maxim, “the child is either one year old or she has come first in a competition. I believe babies are rarely keen participants in competitive sport. Shall we therefore assume it is the former?” The girl held on to his earlobe with a grubby finger and thumb. “Happy birthday, my child,” he said.

Charles did not only give the baby a birthday. He also gave her a name. He chose Sophie, on that first day, on the grounds that nobody could possibly object to it. “Your day has been dramatic and extraordinary enough, child,” he said. “It might be best to have the most ordinary name available. You can be Mary, or Betty, or Sophie. Or, at a stretch, Mildred. Your choice.” Sophie had smiled when he’d said “Sophie,” so Sophie it was. Then he fetched his coat, and folded her up in it, and took her home in a carriage. It rained a little, but it did not worry either of them. Charles did not generally notice the weather, and Sophie had already survived a lot of water that day.

Charles had never really known a child before. He told Sophie as much on the way home: “I do, I’m afraid, understand books far more readily than I understand people. Books are so easy to get along with.” The carriage ride took four hours; Charles held Sophie on the very edge of his knee and told her about himself, as though she were an acquaintance at a tea party. He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time. “But I will be more careful,” he said, “now that there is you, little cello child.” Charles’s home was beautiful, but it was not safe; it was all staircases and slippery floorboards and sharp corners. “I’ll buy some smaller chairs,” he said. “And we’ll have thick red carpets! Although—how does one go about acquiring carpets? I don’t suppose you know, Sophie?”

Unsurprisingly, Sophie did not answer. She was too young to talk, and she was asleep.

She woke when they drew up in a street smelling of trees and horse dung. Sophie loved the house at first sight. The bricks were painted the brightest white in London, and shone even in the dark. The basement was used to store the overflow of books and paintings and several brands of spiders, and the roof belonged to the birds. Charles lived in the space in between.

At home, after a hot bath in front of the stove, Sophie looked very white and fragile. Charles had not known that a baby was so terrifyingly tiny a thing. She felt too small in his arms. He was almost relieved when there was a knock at the door; he laid Sophie down carefully on a chair, with a Shakespearean play as a booster seat, and went down the stairs two at a time.

When he returned, he was accompanied by a large gray-haired woman; Hamlet was slightly damp, and Sophie was looking embarrassed. Charles scooped her up and set her down—hesitating first over an umbrella stand in a corner, and then over the top of the stove—inside the sink. He smiled, and his eyebrows and eyes smiled too. “Please don’t worry,” he said. “We all have accidents, Sophie.” Then he bowed at the woman. “Let me introduce you. Sophie, this is Miss Eliot, from the National Childcare Agency. Miss Eliot, this is Sophie, from the ocean.”

The woman sighed—an official sort of sigh, it would have sounded, from Sophie’s place in the sink—and frowned, and pulled clean clothes from a parcel. “Give her to me.”

Charles took the clothes from her. “I took this child from the sea, ma’am.” Sophie watched, with large eyes. “She has nobody to keep her safe. Whether I like it or not, she is my responsibility.”

“Not forever.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The child is your ward. She is not your daughter.” This was the sort of woman who spoke in italics. You would be willing to lay bets that her hobby was organizing people. “This is a temporary arrangement.”

“I beg to differ,” said Charles. “But we can fight about that later. The child is cold.” He handed the undershirt to Sophie, who sucked on it. He took it back and put it on her. Then he hefted her in his arms, as though about to guess her weight at a fair, and looked at her closely. “You see? She seems a very intelligent baby.” Sophie’s fingers, he saw, were long and thin, and clever. “And she has hair the color of lightning. How could you possibly resist her?”

“I’ll have to come round, to check on her, and I really don’t have the time to spare. A man can’t do this kind of thing alone.”

“Certainly, please do come,” said Charles—and he added, as if he couldn’t stop himself, “if you feel that you absolutely can’t stay away. I will endeavor to be grateful. But this child is my responsibility. Do you understand?”

“But it’s a child! You’re a man!”

“Your powers of observation are formidable,” said Charles. “You are a credit to your optician.”

“But what are you going to do with her?”

Charles looked bewildered. “I am going to love her. That should be enough, if the poetry I’ve read is anything to go by.” Charles handed Sophie a red apple, then took it back and rubbed it on his sleeve until he could see his face in it. He said, “I am sure the secrets of child care, dark and mysterious though they no doubt are, are not impenetrable.”

Charles set the baby on his knee, handed her the apple, and began to read out loud to her from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

It was not, perhaps, the perfect way to begin a new life, but it showed potential.

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Rooftoppers

1 ON THE MORNING of its First Birthday, a baby was found floating in a cello case in the middle of the English Channel.

It was the only living thing for miles. Just the baby, and some dining room chairs, and the tip of a ship disappearing into the ocean. There had been music in the dining hall, and it was music so loud and so good that nobody had noticed the water flooding in over the carpet. The violins went on sawing for some time after the screaming had begun. Sometimes the shriek of a passenger would duet with a high C.

The baby was found wrapped for warmth in the musical score of a Beethoven symphony. It had drifted almost a mile from the ship, and was the last to be rescued. The man who lifted it into the rescue boat was a fellow passenger, and a scholar. It is a scholar’s job to notice things. He noticed that it was a girl, with hair the color of lightning, and the smile of a shy person.

Think of nighttime with a speaking voice. Or think how moonlight might talk, or think of ink, if ink had vocal cords. Give those things a narrow aristocratic face with hooked eyebrows, and long arms and legs, and that is what the baby saw as she was lifted out of her cello case and up into safety. His name was Charles Maxim, and he determined, as he held her in his large hands—at arm’s length, as he would a leaky flowerpot—that he would keep her.

The baby was almost certainly one year old. They knew this because of the red rosette pinned to her front, which read, 1!

“Or rather,” said Charles Maxim, “the child is either one year old or she has come first in a competition. I believe babies are rarely keen participants in competitive sport. Shall we therefore assume it is the former?” The girl held on to his earlobe with a grubby finger and thumb. “Happy birthday, my child,” he said.

Charles did not only give the baby a birthday. He also gave her a name. He chose Sophie, on that first day, on the grounds that nobody could possibly object to it. “Your day has been dramatic and extraordinary enough, child,” he said. “It might be best to have the most ordinary name available. You can be Mary, or Betty, or Sophie. Or, at a stretch, Mildred. Your choice.” Sophie had smiled when he’d said “Sophie,” so Sophie it was. Then he fetched his coat, and folded her up in it, and took her home in a carriage. It rained a little, but it did not worry either of them. Charles did not generally notice the weather, and Sophie had already survived a lot of water that day.

Charles had never really known a child before. He told Sophie as much on the way home: “I do, I’m afraid, understand books far more readily than I understand people. Books are so easy to get along with.” The carriage ride took four hours; Charles held Sophie on the very edge of his knee and told her about himself, as though she were an acquaintance at a tea party. He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time. “But I will be more careful,” he said, “now that there is you, little cello child.” Charles’s home was beautiful, but it was not safe; it was all staircases and slippery floorboards and sharp corners. “I’ll buy some smaller chairs,” he said. “And we’ll have thick red carpets! Although—how does one go about acquiring carpets? I don’t suppose you know, Sophie?”

Unsurprisingly, Sophie did not answer. She was too young to talk, and she was asleep.

She woke when they drew up in a street smelling of trees and horse dung. Sophie loved the house at first sight. The bricks were painted the brightest white in London, and shone even in the dark. The basement was used to store the overflow of books and paintings and several brands of spiders, and the roof belonged to the birds. Charles lived in the space in between.

At home, after a hot bath in front of the stove, Sophie looked very white and fragile. Charles had not known that a baby was so terrifyingly tiny a thing. She felt too small in his arms. He was almost relieved when there was a knock at the door; he laid Sophie down carefully on a chair, with a Shakespearean play as a booster seat, and went down the stairs two at a time.

When he returned, he was accompanied by a large gray-haired woman; Hamlet was slightly damp, and Sophie was looking embarrassed. Charles scooped her up and set her down—hesitating first over an umbrella stand in a corner, and then over the top of the stove—inside the sink. He smiled, and his eyebrows and eyes smiled too. “Please don’t worry,” he said. “We all have accidents, Sophie.” Then he bowed at the woman. “Let me introduce you. Sophie, this is Miss Eliot, from the National Childcare Agency. Miss Eliot, this is Sophie, from the ocean.”

The woman sighed—an official sort of sigh, it would have sounded, from Sophie’s place in the sink—and frowned, and pulled clean clothes from a parcel. “Give her to me.”

Charles took the clothes from her. “I took this child from the sea, ma’am.” Sophie watched, with large eyes. “She has nobody to keep her safe. Whether I like it or not, she is my responsibility.”

“Not forever.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The child is your ward. She is not your daughter.” This was the sort of woman who spoke in italics. You would be willing to lay bets that her hobby was organizing people. “This is a temporary arrangement.”

“I beg to differ,” said Charles. “But we can fight about that later. The child is cold.” He handed the undershirt to Sophie, who sucked on it. He took it back and put it on her. Then he hefted her in his arms, as though about to guess her weight at a fair, and looked at her closely. “You see? She seems a very intelligent baby.” Sophie’s fingers, he saw, were long and thin, and clever. “And she has hair the color of lightning. How could you possibly resist her?”

“I’ll have to come round, to check on her, and I really don’t have the time to spare. A man can’t do this kind of thing alone.”

“Certainly, please do come,” said Charles—and he added, as if he couldn’t stop himself, “if you feel that you absolutely can’t stay away. I will endeavor to be grateful. But this child is my responsibility. Do you understand?”

“But it’s a child! You’re a man!”

“Your powers of observation are formidable,” said Charles. “You are a credit to your optician.”

“But what are you going to do with her?”

Charles looked bewildered. “I am going to love her. That should be enough, if the poetry I’ve read is anything to go by.” Charles handed Sophie a red apple, then took it back and rubbed it on his sleeve until he could see his face in it. He said, “I am sure the secrets of child care, dark and mysterious though they no doubt are, are not impenetrable.”

Charles set the baby on his knee, handed her the apple, and began to read out loud to her from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

It was not, perhaps, the perfect way to begin a new life, but it showed potential.

Product Image 1 of 1

Rooftoppers

Embrace possibility in this luminous novel about a girl in search of her past who discovers a secret rooftop world in Paris.

Everyone thinks that Sophie is an orphan. True, there were no other recorded female survivors from the shipwreck that left baby Sophie floating in the English Channel in a cello case, but Sophie remembers seeing her mother wave for help. Her guardian tells her it is almost impossible that her mother is still alive—but “almost impossible” means “still possible.” And you should never ignore a possible.

So when the Welfare Agency writes to her guardian, threatening to send Sophie to an orphanage, she takes matters into her own hands and flees to Paris to look for her mother, starting with the only clue she has— the address of the cello maker.

Evading the French authorities, she meets Matteo and his network of rooftoppers—urchins who live in the hidden spaces above the city. Together they scour the city in a search for Sophie’s mother—but can they find her before Sophie is caught and sent back to London? Or, more importantly, before she loses hope?

Phillip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials series, calls Rooftoppers “the work of a writer with an utterly distinctive voice and a wild imagination.”

Video

Rooftoppers

Praise

"Katherine Rundell’s Rooftoppers, like her previous novel Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, is the work of a writer with an utterly distinctive voice and a wild imagination. I admire her novels very much, and I hope they find the success they deserve. I’m certainly looking forward to her next."

"Katherine Rundell’s Rooftoppers, like her previous novel Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, is the work of a writer with an utterly distinctive voice and a wild imagination. I admire her novels very much, and I hope they find the success they deserve. I’m certainly looking forward to her next."

– Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials series

"Katherine Rundell's Rooftoppers is a confection of lyrical prose. Bold imaginative leaps carry the reader from one Parisian rooftop to the next in this unique and beautifully written tale of a girl in search of the mother whom everyone else believes is dead."

– Maryrose Wood, author of The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series

"Rooftoppers drew me in immediately and carried me along straight to the end with its original voice and lively story."

– Sharon Creech, Newbery-award winning author of Walk Two Moons

"Here comes a classic... Fantastic joyous storytelling. I was entranced. This is the only book I have ever read that made me long to cook sausages on a roof. From the first page onwards I knew I was reading something that sparkled (and it just got brighter and brighter). I'm a bit jealous actually; I wish I'd written it. Gorgeous, witty, kind, amazing, vertigo inducing, breathtaking, utterly charming, loved, loved, loved this little gem of a book. Hold your breath- this book is magic."

– Hilary McKay, Whitbread Children's Book award-winning author of the Casson Family series

"* The beauty of sky, music, and the belief in extraordinary things triumph in this whimsical and magical tale."

– Publishers Weekly, starred review

"* A glorious adventure…the story is magic."

– Booklist, starred review

"Some stories unfurl with such elegant wit that you feel the author must have been smiling constantly while typing away. Such is the case with Katherine Rundell's Rooftoppers, a sparkling and lovely novel."

– Wall Street Journal

"Rundell’s gentle poetic style gives Sophie’s story a full-heartedness that makes it take flight at times and sweeps readers along with it...Realistic fiction with the feel of fantasy, this atmospheric novel will appeal to a wide range of middle-grade readers."

– School Library Journal, starred review

"Rooftoppers, Katherine Rundell’s winsome contribution to the genre, is a throwback, avoiding the hard-boiled life lessons of the modern child’s thriller in favor of the wishful logic of the fairy tale."

– NYTBR

Read an Excerpt

Rooftoppers

By Katherine Rundell

Illustrated by: Terry Fan

Excerpts

Excerpt 1

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PRAISE

"Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms is the work of a writer with an utterly distinctive voice and a wild imagination. I admire her novels very much, and I hope they find the success they deserve. I’m certainly looking forward to her next."

– Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials series

"Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms is the work of a writer with an utterly distinctive voice and a wild imagination. I admire her novels very much, and I hope they find the success they deserve. I’m certainly looking forward to her next."

About the Author

Katherine Rundell is the author of Rooftoppers, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner), and The Wolf Wilder. She grew up in Zimbabwe, Brussels, and London, and is currently a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She begins each day with a cartwheel and believes that reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless. In her spare time, she enjoys walking on tightropes and trespassing on the rooftops of Oxford colleges.